For Labor Day weekend, Stephanie and I went to Lake Lure, NC with her parents. We took a bunch of pictures while we were there, mostly of Chimney Rock. Check them out!
You may notice when viewing my photos that it looks a little different. I tried to make the text small enough that you see very little header before the photo, hopefully reducing the amount of scrolling you have to do if you aren’t running at a high resolution. I also moved the timestamp down below the image, since most people probably don’t care about it. It was a bit tricky to come up with an algorithm for determining the color of the header based on the color of the background, but I think I’ve come up with one that works fairly well.
If you have any comments about the new photos view, feel free to let me know.
September 6, 9:40 pm
What camera mode were you using when you took the “water trickling” shots (slow shutter speed)? I’ve messed around with shutter priority mode on my camera, but the results are always really bad. I guess I need to experiment some more.
September 6, 11:39 pm
According to the metadata, the fast exposure was 0.010 (1/100) seconds, while the slow was 0.077 (1/13) seconds. But the setting I changed on my camera was “exposure bias,” from -2.0 (fast exposure) to 0.0 (slow exposure). I don’t think that I changed anything else. Since I don’t have a tripod, I set the camera on a wooden railing and used a timer shot, so that I wouldn’t be touching it while it took the long exposure. Both pictures were in ISO 100 (the lowest my camera goes to (yesterday I learned what “ISO” (in relation to photography) means)).
I have found that the auto mode on my camera tends to take too long of an exposure, resulting in a lot of blurred photos. So one day I played around with the settings while taking pictures of a ceiling fan, until I got it where the blades weren’t blurred. I’m sure that’s the method all the pros use. ;)
Most of the brighter, more washed out pictures from this set were either with Auto or from my mother-in-law’s camera. The darker, crisper, and slightly warmer pictures were from my custom setting (and nearly all of those were brightened a little in Picasa). I got the idea of long-exposure water from a guy I work with, who took some pictures like that. But he actually knows what he is doing and has much better equipment, so his look much better than mine (see also his astronomy photos with exposures of up to several hours.. ya know, the kind where you need equipment to take into account the rotation of the earth).